I was born in Chicago, grew up south of San Diego on the U.S. Mexico border, and have lived in Ohio for the last twenty years. As a young man, I was an anti-war activist and then a community and labor organizer. Later in life I became a writer and educator, spending ten years teaching college. I have continued to be active in the causes of workers and in the civil rights movements of African Americans and Latino immigrants. My wife Sherry Baron and I live in Cincinnati where I teach Spanish at a local elementary school. We have two sons, Traven and Reed, both of whom are in college, one in New York and one in Illinois. My older son Jake is a musician and actor who lives in Los Angeles. In 2010, concerned about the country’s economic crisis, health care, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the environmental crisis, I decided to run for the Senate as the Socialist Party candidate. Read more.
On the Campaign for Justice
I want my Senate race to be a campaign for justice. We must create a society where all of our people find good jobs at a living wage. A society where everyone enjoys the right to publicly funded health care and education. We need to make America the leader in peace and in creating a world where all nations and peoples enjoy the share in the common abundance possible on this planet.
We can only do this by building a new consciousness where we take responsibility to support each other, ‘a solidarity consciousness.’ This is the idea, for example, that I will help take care of your grandmother and know that you will do everything you can to help take care of mine. We all know the expression, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That’s the concept. I will help you with your problems, and expect that you will help me with mine. The strong help the weak, and even the apparently weak will in their way help the strong. We do this now among friends and neighbors and we must learn to do this as a nation and then as a world.
We cannot get to that place, however, except through the common work, the common struggle of ending the power of those in our society that stand for selfishness, for greed, and for the neglect of everyone but themselves. The central obstacle to a better society is the corporation, an institution that stands in the way of morality, of social progress, and of fairness. We need a country where the majority—not an economic oligarchy—control our country’s resources. Working people—steelworkers and nurse, bus drivers, waiters and teachers–make the country run, and working people—not the banks and corporations—should run the country.
To bring that about, we will have to fight to take the corporations and their wealth, bring it under our society’s democratic control, and redirect its resources to the issues of housing, health, education, and peace.
On the Role of a Senator
As a Socialist in Congress, I will use the office of Senator to organize and mobilize the American people. I would as Senator support and call for mobilizations of Ohio’s people and the people of the country to stop the wars, to create jobs, to win health care for all, and to stop the destruction of the environment.
The Republican and Democratic parties, representing the banks and corporations, and committed to capitalism with all its injustices and inequalities, cannot be expected to solve our problems. I count, however, on what I know of the American peoples’ better nature—the belief in justice and equality—as the reservoir of hope for the future.
Change never comes without struggle. As in the great periods of social transformation in the American past, we need a working peoples’ movement to bring about change. Workers’ strikes for higher wages, a movement against home foreclosures, a national movement in the streets to stop the war will bring change. Senators don’t make history. Working people can and will. Let’s do it. Let’s make history. Let’s make a society of fairness and justice in America.
